2015: International Lomonosov Conference on Physics of Elementary Particles was held at the MSU Department of Physics within the International Year of Light 2015

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The 17th Lomonosov Conference on Elementary Particle Physics was held at the MSU Faculty of Physics from 20th to 26th of August. This series of international events has been conducted since 1992 under the auspices of the Rector of Moscow University academician V.A. Sadovnichy. The preparations for the conference and its organization were immensely supported by the Dean of the Faculty of Physics N.N. Sysoev. At the opening of the conference the participants were greeted by the welcoming speech of the prorector of MSU academician A.R. Khokhlov.

The conference was organized with the support of the Russian Ministry of Education and Science and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research. At the stage of preparation significant help was provided by the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna) and by Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The conference programme which contains around 200 talks covers current problems of elementary particle physics, gravitation and cosmology. The conference was attended by residents of 30 countries and it is one of the major international events of this kind regularly held in Russia. Many talks were dedicated to the latest results of research into the properties of the Higgs boson recently discovered at the LHC (CERN). A great deal of the conference programme was devoted to the most recent achievements in neutrino and astroparticle physics.

Among the presenters are the members of the Russian Academy of Sciences A.A. Slavnov (Steklov Mathematical Institute and MSU), A.A. Starobinsky (Landau ITP), M.I. Vysotsky (ITEP), I.I. Tkachev (INR RAS). The plenary talks were given by the world leaders in research on various branches of the conference scientific programme, e.g. N. Mandolesi (Ferrara, Italy), the director of the largest experiment on the detection of cosmic rays Planck, B. Barish (CalTech, USA), the leader of the International Linear Collider, M. Koratsinos (CERN), the leader of the new supercollider FCC-ee at CERN, N. Gehrels (NASA, USA), the director of the project on cosmic rays exploration SWIFT, S.-B. Kim (Seoul, Republic of Korea), the director of the international neutrino experiment RENO, M. Nakahata (Tokyo, Japan), the director of the underground neutrino laboratory Kamiokande, P. Belli (INFN, Rome, Italy), the director of the experiment on the Dark Matter search DAMA/LIBRA, R. Jacobsson (CERN, Switzerland), the director of the project on searches for new physics beyond the Standard Model SHiP, R.Wilson (Colorado, USA), the director of the neutrino experiment DUNE, I. Bozovic Jelisavcic (Belgrade, Serbia), the director of the accelerator experiment CLIC (CERN), O. Adriani (Florence, Italy), the leader of the accelerator experiment LHCf (CERN), G. Dattoli (Frascati, Italy), the director of the free-electron laser programme in Frascati.

The year 2015 was pronounced the Year of Light by the UN General Assembly since it marks several anniversaries of major discoveries in the theory of electromagnetic radiation and propagation of light made by J. Maxwell (1865), A. Einstein (1905 and 1915), A. Penzias with R. Wilson (1965). A special scientific session of the conference was devoted to the year of light, which was carried out in the form of a round table discussion on Elementary Particles in the Year of Light: from Maxwells Equations to the Physics beyond the Standard Model.